video

Free Documentaries

free-documentaries

One of the good things about doing break time duty is that you get to talk to staff that you would normally not get to know.  You also find out things that you didn’t know and some of them turn out to be useful.  Top Documentary Films is a site which catalogues a bunch of free documentaries found on various video sites on the web.  I scanned a few and some were English with foreign subtitles, others vice-versa and regular English no subs.  Using the VideoDownloadHelper plugin for Firefox I can transfer these videos to our internal PHP Motion server so that students can watch them without cranking through the bandwidth.  Another great resource.

Time for some inspiration.

time-for-some-inspiration

There are times when I start to feel a little stale cocooned in my world and I have forgotten to look outside.  Thanks to my new iPad I found this as I browsed video podcasts on iTunes.

PHPMotion 3

PHPMotion Redux

markdaviesBack in April 2008 I did a post on a YouTube clone called PHPMotion which was then in version 1.  The software is now in version 3 and we have just installed it on our school server.  The latest version is still a bit of a pain to install, it runs on PHP and MYSQL like wordpress, but is not as well supported or documented.  The bottom line is you better be keen but you will save a heap on bandwidth and be able to give access to all those great videos available online.  As well as YouTube videos you can also add clips from DVD’s.  If you did this on YouTube they would quickly receive a take down notice from the copyright holder but with PHPMotion only accessible from the internal network people in the outside world are non the wiser – of course you must own the material to start with.  As a Hard Materials and Graphics teacher I find some fantastic instructional videos on using tools and techniques which I can now share without using extra bandwidth.

Version 3 also has photo sharing which means you can keep photographs of students safely in the gated village if you so wish rather than using public photo sharing like Flickr.

If you want any help setting up a video sharing server let us know and we will see what we can do to help.

PHPMotion 3

Everlong

I downmarkdaviesloaded the guitar tab (sheet music for guitar) for “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters about 2 years ago now.  It’s one of those songs that I love, especially the acoustic version, but every time I try and play it I put it back in the “too hard basket”.  It also happens to be one of the songs on Guitar Hero World Tour which I score quite highly on guitar and that prompted me to have another go on the real guitar.

I have basically taught myself guitar recently from downloading tabs of songs I know and trying  to replicate them but without having any proper tuition sometimes I am stumped.  Then it occurred to me to go to YouTube for a guitar lesson and no kidding, I was playing Everlong within about half an hour.  Even my wife said it sounded good.

I picked up a couple of key points from the video.  Firstly I needed to tune my E string down to D and boy did that make life easier.  Most importantly the teacher talks about holding shapes with your fingers on the frets.  Trying to apply numbers and fingers and frets from a diagram is hard but when the guy says make this shape with your fingers, then move it here, then here it all becomes clearer.

I could go on to apply lots of profound educational speak about the way people learn but take whatever meaning you like from this.  Instead I encourage everyone to learn a musical instrument using the internet and I hope you get as much satisfaction as I do.

Video conversion with DownloadHelper

Please be aware that with the updates of downloadhelper you now have the ability to convert as well as download. Follow the link below for further instructions.

DownloadHelper’s primary job is to retrieve to your disk the videos that are playing in Web pages, in their original format.

Unfortunately, the native format generally FLV is often not very convenient when it comes to playing back the videos, on either your home computer or a hand held device, burning them to a DVD or reworking the movie.

With the new DownloadHelper’s Video Conversion feature, you can very easily select one or more videos that lie on your disk and choose a pre-defined output format. The program will process the movies in background.

Even better: you can setup the extension to automatically convert the videos as soon as they are saved by DownloadHelper. You can even specify conversion rules which site, which original media format to be processed with a given set of parameters.

Video conversion is available on DownloadHelper 3.1 or later.

Video conversion with DownloadHelper.